What all these bands did share was an element of anarchy and nonconformity. That first X record, or all the Black Flag records from that time, were masterpieces. Darby Crash’s lyrics for the Germs were as good as it ever got in the world of punk rock. He was on to a whole other level of intelligence.
So Mike and I hung out in the parking lot of the Starwood, probably the best punk-rock venue around then, and we started to poke our noses through the door of this world. The Starwood was a tough club to sneak into, but there was a side door near the parking lot, guarded by a huge bouncer. If a fight broke out and his attention got diverted, we’d slip in as fast as we could. Sometimes, if a bunch of people were going in, we tried the crawling thing and used them as cover. When we couldn’t sneak into the show, we’d linger in the parking lot, but neither of us had a lot of mojo or game, so we’d have to watch the goings-on. Nobody was inviting us to hang out.
One time Mike and I sneaked into the Starwood for a Black Flag show. We were fish out of water. We loved these bands, but we dressed all wrong and we had the wrong haircuts and the wrong shoes and we didn’t even dance like all the punks. Those guys had the really cool boots with the chains wrapped around them and the right combination of ripped-up plaid clothes and spiked haircuts. Mike and I were lucky to have one leather jacket between the two of us.
Black Flag put on an amazing show. They had a guy onstage called Mugger who was in charge of security. Every time someone tried to jump up onstage and dance around a bit and then jump back off, Mugger would just attack the person and get into a brutal fistfight. During all this, the band did not miss a beat. One guy managed to get past Mugger and stage-dive. He flew right by me, and I got kicked in the head with his heavy steel-toed boot. I almost passed out.
One of the reasons we didn’t plunge feet-first into this scene was that in some ways, we were still model students at Fairfax. At least I was. It was a strange dichotomy. I smoked tons of pot, took pills, and drank on the weekends. But it never got out of control. I never missed school. It was important to me to be the straight-A student. In a way, I was a rebel by getting good grades, because most of the stoners and the druggies were getting no grades. I didn’t want to be like them. When I was a junior, I got my report card, and it was A’s all the way down the line, which I loved. I wanted to be the best at whatever it was that was in front of me. On my terms. I didn’t necessarily want to study for hours to get there, but I wanted to do enough at the last minute.
By this time we were all thinking about college. At the end of my senior year, my grades were starting to slip, and I had to go to Mrs. Lopez, my Spanish teacher, and beg, borrow, and steal to get a B. Mike was having his own problems with grades. He always vacillated between being an absolutely brilliant student and an absolute flunk-out. Our last semester he was in Don Platt’s honors history class with Haya. Platt was a no-nonsense general who was in total command of his class. He was bald but in great physical shape, with a perfect tan, a suave Gavin MacLeod type.
Mike and I had been running around like maniacs the week before his big final, and he didn’t study for it, so he cheated. The last guy on Planet Earth you’d want to get busted by for cheating was Don Platt. He was not afraid to call you out in front of the class and humiliate you. That’s what he did to Mike, who came out of class that day white as a ghost. Getting a D in Platt’s class would put a pretty major dent in Mike’s chances for getting a good grade-point average.
But it wasn’t my worry. I was already a shoo-in to college with my grades. In fact, I planned to go to Don Platt for one of my recommendations so I could go to UCLA. I had been Platt’s student for three years, and I had aced every one of his classes, so I knew he’d give me the crown jewel of all recommendations. A few days later, I went to see him after school, and he had a very unwelcoming look on his face. I asked him for a recommendation, and it was as if he already had a speech prepared. “Anyone who associates with Michael Balzary is not a friend of mine, nor is he getting a recommendation from me. For all I know, you and Michael were cheating the whole time you were in my classes.”
This was absurd. I was probably the best student he’d had in ten years. The only time I’d even come close to crossing him was in my first semester. I had chosen to do an oral report on Uriah P. Levy, who was a great American naval officer. During the course of my research, I discovered the derivation of the word “fuck.” It came from the early naval logs that the captain would keep. If a crew member was punished for having sexual intercourse, it was noted in the log as “FUCK” (for unlawful carnal knowledge). That was too good a factoid not to share with the class.
So I was up there spieling on Uriah P. Levy and the navy, and it was all Monty Pythonesque to me. I got to the punishable offenses, and I walked up to the chalkboard and wrote “F, U, C, K” in huge letters. I looked over at Mr. Platt, and the blood was rushing to the top of his bald head, but I never cracked a smile and continued to explain the concept. Meanwhile, Mike and the rest of the class came unglued, but there was nothing Platt could do. I had him.
Now he thought he had me. I tried to make my case for the recommendation, but he wasn’t having any of it. “There’s the door,” he said. I walked out of there shell-shocked. Ultimately, I wound up going to the geometry teacher, and he was nice enough to write me a great recommendation. But I still had to get even with Platt.
Somewhere along the line that semester, I had stumbled upon some cardboard boxes of beautiful big black and red plastic marquee letters. Thinking they might be useful for an art project, I kept them. At the end of that Memorial Day weekend, the night before we were supposed to return to classes, Mike and I were driving around, stoned on pot, listening to music, when a brilliant idea came to me.
We drove up to the marquee in front of Fairfax High and started climbing up the pole, armed with the appropriate letters. Then we spelled out DANDY DON PLATT SUCKS ANUS, and motor-oiled the pole and the platform to inhibit the progress of anyone who would try to take our message down.
We looked up at the sign, congratulated each other, and went home and fell asleep. The next day we went to school, and there was a whole hubbub of activity around the marquee, people taking pictures and workmen trying to circumvent the motor oil and get those letters off.
Nobody ever came to Mike or me for questioning. We weren’t even suspects. Maybe Platt had screwed over enough kids that there was an abundance of people with a motive. But that wasn’t the end of it. At the end of that summer, we decided to leave a message for the incoming class at Fairfax. So we went back to the box of letters, climbed back up that pole, and left DANDY DON CONTINUES TO SUCK ANUS.
Chapter 4
Under the Zero One Sun
I was thrilled to find out I’d been accepted to UCLA. Not only was I going to the same university my father had, but Haya, who could have gotten into any school in the country, had chosen to stay home and go to college with me. It was like the planets had aligned.
But I came back down to earth pretty fast. I never felt at home at UCLA. The student body was filled with Poindexters and Asian kids who weren’t there to socialize or yuk it up at all. Everyone there was all business, all the time. I didn’t make one friend the entire time I was there. Besides, club-going and partying at Donde’s house and running around with Hillel and Mike was way more important to me than studying Chinese history, which was, don’t ask me why, one of the classes I signed up for.
On top of these general woes, my finances were completely on the skids. I had no income except for the twenty dollars a month my mom was sending me. So I reverted to my old practices. When it came to getting textbooks, which were incredibly expensive, I went to the campus bookstore, filled up my basket, walked over by the exit, nudged it past the sensors, then bought a pack of gum and picked up my free books on the way out. When it came to food, I’d go to the school cafeteria, which had a great selection of hot and cold meals, and fill up a tray. Before I got to the register, I’d start going backward in line
, as if picking up things I had missed, until I got to the end of the line. Then I’d walk out with the food. I never got caught. Hillel would often come and join me, because he was on a budget, too. Those meals with him were probably the most joyous moments of my college career.
That year, Hillel, Mike, and I perfected something we called dining and dashing. We’d pick restaurants that had a lot of traffic and a lot of waitresses, like Canter’s on Fairfax. We’d eat our food, then individually slip out the door. The sad thing was, we didn’t stop to think that these poor waitresses were getting stuck with the check, and even if the restaurant didn’t make them pay for our meal, they weren’t getting their tips. It wasn’t until years later, when I had to examine the consequences of some of my earlier behavior, that I began to make amends by going back to these places and putting some money in their tills.
Hillel had a lot of free time on his hands that first semester, because he didn’t go on to college after Fairfax. I’d meet him after school and hang out with him on the weekends and get high on pot. He was a late bloomer to drug use, but he loved his weed.
I relished the time I spent with him, since I sure wasn’t looking forward to school. I hated all my classes except one: an expository composition class taught by a young female professor. Each week we had to write a composition that she’d critique. Even though I was the great procrastinator and would wait until the night before the paper was due to even think about it, I loved that class. I got an A on every paper, and like Jill Vernon, the teacher would keep me after class and encourage me to write more.
If some of my other classes had been Recreational Drugtaking 101 or, better yet, Advanced Coke Shooting, I might have fared better at UCLA. I was fourteen the first time I shot coke. I was at one of my dad’s parties back on Palm Street, watching all the adults shooting up, and I badgered them into making up a small load and shooting me up. At the end of my senior year at Fairfax, I started shooting up again. One of the first times, I was alone at home and felt so ecstatic that I called Haya. I told her, “This is the greatest feeling ever. We have to do this together.” I didn’t see it as a road to death and insanity, I just saw it as a beautiful, beautiful feeling.
As euphoric as that feeling is, the comedown from shooting coke is horrific. Dante’s Inferno times ten. You fall into a dark and demonic, depressing place, in an agonizing state of discomfort, because all of these chemicals that you normally have to release ever so slowly to keep yourself comfortable in your skin are now gone, and you have nothing inside to make you feel okay. That’s one of the reasons I took heroin a few years later. It became the eighty-foot pillow to break that cocaine fall.
I never had any qualms about using needles to ingest drugs. Once I even made shooting up into a weird art project. I was still at Fairfax, and I’d had a fight with Haya. She had been ignoring me for a couple of days, so I drove over to her dad’s store, where she worked. I pulled up in front of her car and, in broad daylight, stuck an empty syringe in my arm and drew out a couple cc’s of fresh blood. Then I walked up to her car, squirted the blood back into the palm of my hand, smeared it on my mouth, and made blood kisses all over her windshield and the driver’s-side window. My romantic little blood project worked. I went home and got a call later that day: “I got your message. That was so nice. I love you so much.” Unfortunately, the blood stained the glass, and despite repeated washings, we never could erase all the traces of those blood kisses.
I was comfortable with syringes, but my dilemma was how to get them. I figured it out one day when I was walking through a supermarket that had a pharmacy. I saw an advertisement for insulin, and a lightbulb went off in my head. I realized that if I went up to the counter and acted like a diabetic and ordered my insulin first, when I asked for syringes, they wouldn’t even question it. I marched up and ordered the Lente U 100 insulin. The pharmacist went to the refrigerator and got out a box of insulin vials, and as he was walking back, I offhandedly said, “Oh, you’d better throw in a pack of micro-fine threes, too.” Without missing a beat, he grabbed some syringes. That scam worked for me for years and years.
My drug use increased exponentially during that first year at UCLA. I knew that just down the road, life was in session, and that was where I would go for my education, which included going to every concert I could afford. I saw the Talking Heads and the Police. I even went to New York with Donde to visit his family and see some shows. It was Donde’s birthday, so we dropped some acid and went to Tracks to see John Lurie and the Lounge Lizards, then to the Bottom Line to take in Arthur Blythe. To our amazement, Blythe had Kelvyn Bell, the great guitar player from Defunkt, playing with him. The show was incredible, and after it was over, I went to the bar and talked to Kelvyn about music and about his guitar playing and the records that I knew he’d played on. He was very happy to engage about music with this eighteen-year-old boy from Hollywood who was blazing on acid.
I was excited because Kelvyn was one of the people who had gotten me seriously into music. Donde had his Defunkt album, and when we’d have people over to the house, he’d put it on and say, “Everyone get around. Anthony’s going to dance,” and I’d bust some moves. Dancing became this playful competition for us, and at one point we all started going to dance contests. We’d show up at Osco’s, a hip punk-rock disco on La Cienega, and Hillel and Mike and I would enter the contest. We were off the map. Most people would break out conventional dance moves that you’d seen before, but we’d go out and invent steps.
Besides constantly playing records, Donde also had an inexpensive electric guitar and an amplifier. On the weekends when he wasn’t working at his dad’s telephone answering service, he would sit there and bang away on this electric guitar. He knew a few chords, but he had a really harsh tone, so when he’d start noodling around, I usually got out of the house. Still, one day Donde suggested that he and I and Mike should form a band. He’d play guitar, I’d sing, and Mike would play bass. Though it was more of a joke than anything else, we rehearsed a few times at his dad’s theater in Hollywood. The biggest contribution to this project was the name. Our friend Patrick English used to refer to his dick as a “spigot,” and I thought it was such a fantastic nickname that I became Spigot Blister. Donde named himself Skid Mark. I forget Mike’s name. We called ourselves Spigot Blister and the Chest Pimps, the chest pimps being the pimples that resided on Mike’s pubescent chest. Our rehearsals consisted mostly of making noise. In retrospect, it was more of an exercise in coming up with personas than coming up with music. We didn’t write any songs or even any lyrics, we just made some bad noise and screamed and banged on things. Eventually, we lost interest in the whole project.
But seeing Kelvyn Bell was inspirational for me, and I had a distinct feeling, even though I didn’t have a concrete means of achieving it, that whatever I ended up doing with my life, I wanted to make people feel the way this music was making me feel. The only problem was that I wasn’t a guitar player and I wasn’t a bass player and I wasn’t a drummer and I wasn’t a singer, I was a dancer and a party maniac, and I didn’t quite know how to parlay that into a job.
Every attempt that I’d made to even keep a job had turned into a dismal failure. Back at Fairfax, I went through a succession of shitty little jobs that highlighted how incapable I was of fitting into society. I worked at a collections agency, I worked for a country store, I even worked as an underage waiter at the Improv, but I got canned from each of these gigs. At UCLA, I was so desperate for money that I read a notice on the crappy-jobs-where-we-can-exploit-the-students-and-get-them-to-work-for-nothing board that a rich family in Hancock Park needed a dog walker for their two German shepherds. I didn’t mind taking the daily walk, and I didn’t mind hanging out with the dogs, but it was a pathetic situation to have to walk these dogs for all of twenty-five dollars a week.
Sometime during that first year, I couldn’t pay Donde rent anymore, so I had to leave. I went back to that same job board and found a notice that said, “Room and board
for young male student, willing to participate in the caretaking of a nine-year-old boy. Single mother needs help taking the boy to and from school.” The woman lived in a small, quaint house in Beverlywood. She was a young mom who’d been jilted by some dude and was now alone with a so-called hyperactive, attention-deficit kid who was being dosed with Ritalin. She liked me right away. My responsibilities weren’t that great, basically making sure that the kid got to school in the morning and was picked up in the afternoon and served a snack.
For me it was ideal. I had a roof over my head, some food in my stomach, and a nice room where Haya would regularly visit and we would engage in some noisy lovemaking sessions. After a while, I bonded with the little guy. He might have been a touch mentally challenged, but he wasn’t hyperactive or suffering from a shortened attention span. When we were together, he wasn’t spastic or out of control. I had read that when adults took Ritalin, instead of having a calming effect, it would stimulate the postadolescent chemical balance. One night Hillel and Mike came over, and we decided to test those theories. Sure enough, in combination with a nice stolen bottle of Finnish vodka, we were off to the races. We ate handfuls of the Ritalin and became three drunk comets running around the house. The kid had a great time, and when his mom and her date came home a bit tipsy, she partied with us, never realizing that we were high on her son’s meds. Eventually, though, she fired me from the job.
I was almost history at school, too. From the first few weeks, I had felt totally alienated from campus life, so much of an outsider that I memorialized the feeling with a harsh, bizarre haircut. I decided to cut all of my hair really short except for the back, which was long, down to my shoulders. I wasn’t mimicking hockey players or people from Canada, it was just my idea of a punk-rock haircut. It was probably inspired by David Bowie and his Pinups era, but it wasn’t flaming red, and I didn’t have the standing-up thing in the front, I had bangs. To people at UCLA, it was abominable. Even my friends were freaked out by it. But Mike approved. He always said that one of my greatest accomplishments was that I had invented the mullet.